One of the names most closely associated with Anton Chekov is Konstantin Stanislavski. As the director of the Moscow Art Theatre, a prominent actor, and an acting theorist, Stanislavski was irrefutably one of the most significant forces in Russian and Western theater.
Stanislavski was born as Konstantin Sergeyevich Alekseyev in Moscow in 1863 and joined a family theatrical group when he was only 14. He changed his name to Stanislavski in 1885; it was the name of a fellow actor he’d met.
Stanislavski became the theater group’s leading figure, founded the Society of Art and Literature in 1888, and co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre in 1897. Its first staging was Tolstoy’s Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich, and Chekov’s The Seagull cemented its position as one of the finest acting troupes and theaters in the world.
After a 1910 sabbatical in Italy where Stanislavski studied Italian actors Eleanora Duse and Tommaso Salvini’s freer, more emotional practice, he began to develop the Stanislavski system, or “the method,” which revolutionized acting. He believed that theater needed to be more than external representation, and that an actor’s main job was to be believed, not understood. The way an actor would achieve the requisite level of authenticity was to draw on his or her emotional memories. The actor would take his or her own personality onto the stage, rather than leaving it behind to embody the character; they would have to delve more deeply into writers’ unsaid messages to access the characters. Theater critic Michael Billington explains it thusly: “a crude simplification would go like this. For the spectator to identify with the actor, the actor has to identify with the role. S/he can do this in a variety of ways: by summoning up memories from his/her past; by relying on what Stanislavsky called the 'creative if', in which the actor is transported from the plane of real life to that of the imagination; or by focusing on the character's ultimate objective and then breaking the action down into specific units. All this may sound like gobbledegook to non-actors, but it is part of the vocabulary of modern theatre. It's also important to remember that Stanislavsky believed that the actor's inner experience had to be matched by external technique.”
The Moscow Art Theatre took a world tour in 1922-1924, and some of the members stayed on in the United States to instruct performers in the method. The actors who benefited from this teaching subsequently formed the Actors Group Theatre, later the Actors Studio. Many actors throughout the 20th and 21st centuries utilized the technique, including Marlon Brando, Lee Strasberg, Gregory Peck, and Viggo Mortenson.
Stanislavski died in Moscow on August 7th, 1938.
